Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2 (Marvel Studios, Walt Disney Pictures, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, May 8) I ran the Blu-Ray disc of the 2017 film Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2, a sequel to the 2014 Guardians of the Galaxy and a quite interesting film which I liked a good deal better than its predecessor. I ran it alone because my husband Charles was working last night; I felt a bit bad about that because, among other things, we’d watched the first Guardians of the Galaxy together and he’d liked it better than I had. But I wanted to watch it before tonight, when the Bears San Diego are doing a movie watch party for Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3, and I wanted to see both previous Guardians of the Galaxy movies so I don’t get any weird surprises from the new one. I still remember the odd experience I had when I watched Black Widow at a previous Bears movie event and there was a post-credits sequence showing Black Widow’s tombstone. “What’s this?” I wondered. “I thought she was still alive at the end.” It turned out she was; she’d been killed later on in one of the Avengers movies, which was set after Black Widow even though it was made before it. I may be in for a similar surprise since the imdb.com description of Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3 begins with the information that the lead character, Peter Quill a.k.a. Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), is “still reeling from the loss of Gamora” (Zoe Saldana), even though at the end of Volume 2 Gamora is still very much alive and she and Peter seem to be heading for the romantic relationship he’s been after from the get-go while she’s been diffident and evasive about it.

I really liked Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2 precisely because this time around writer-director James Gunn (who took sole credit for the script, though the credits list quite a lot of other people who helped evolve the comic-book series on which these films were based: Dan Abnett and Abby Lanning for the overall concept; Steve Englehart and Steve Gan for creating the Star-Lord character; Jim Starlin for creating Gamora and Drax [Dave Bautista], a hulking character who looks like a World Wrestling Federation wrestler who was badly burned in a fire; Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby for creating Groot, an animate tree voiced by Vin Diesel – here he’s just a sapling from the original Groot – Bill Mantlo and Keith Griffen for creating Rocket Raccoon [voiced by Bradley Cooper], a genetically engineered creature who walks on two legs and delivers insult-comic wisecracks; and Steve Gerber and Val Meyerik for creating Howard the Duck, who makes two brief and meaningless cameo appearances) actually put some real human emotions into his script. The first Guardians of the Galaxy movie revealed that Peter Quill was a half-human, half-alien being; his mother, Meredith Quill (Laura Haddock), was a normal human who was dying of cancer at the start of the first film but is here shown on a date with Peter’s dad, which will eventually result in Peter’s conception. The father turns out to be Ego (Kurt Russell), who at first appears to be on the side of good; he’s created an entire planet for himself, where Peter and the other Guardians land after they’re being chased by the Sovereigns, a race who look like bronze statues and have super-powerful batteries which they need to be protected against a dragon-like monster who’s trying to steal them.

Ego gives them refuge after the Sovereign queen Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki) swore to kill them after someone in their entourage – through most of the movie we think it’s Rocket Raccoon but at the end it turns out to be Yondu Udonta (Michael Rooker), Peter’s foster-father and a member of a sect of thieves called the Ravagers, who kidnapped the young Peter at the start of the first Guardians movie – stole some of those priceless batteries. (Now we know how Peter was able to keep his Walkman going all those years, long after the batteries it contained when he was beamed up from Earth would have expired.) Only Ego’s companion, a half-woman, half-insect named Mantis (Pom Klementieff), warns Peter that Ego is really evil; he wants to depopulate the entire universe and replace all its life forms with clones of himself. Through a series of flashbacks both Peter and we learn that Ego traveled far and wide throughout the universe visiting various planets and having affairs with their females to produce super-powerful offspring, only to kill them all except Peter when only Peter had the light-manipulating super-power. Ego also inserted into Meredith Quill the tumor that gave her the brain cancer that killed her, and naturally Peter is super-upset that his father killed his mother just because he found her inconvenient. The film has a long action climax in which one of the Guardians has to infiltrate the core of Ego’s being and blow him up with a nuclear weapon, and the sapling Groot is the only one of the Guardians small enough to execute the mission – though Groot has a hard time remembering the instructions on how to set off the bomb and keeps wanting to push one of the red buttons, which will detonate it instantly and blow up all the Guardians. (This is an echo of Yondu’s explanation of why he kept custody of Peter after he beamed him to another planet: he needed someone who was still a child so he could get into places the adult Ravagers couldn’t.)

Alas, Yondu also dies, sacrificing himself so the Guardians can get away, so Peter has the trauma of losing both his actual father and the foster-father who raised him. There’s a spectacular sequence representing Yondu’s funeral, after which fellow Ravager Kraglin Obfonteri (Sean Gunn, who next to Chris Pratt is the sexiest guy in this film) acquires Yondu’s fin, which gives him the power to direct an arrow in mid-flight with his mind, while Queen Ayesha creates a man-monster she names “Adam” (get it?) to continue her as-yet unfulfilled task of killing the Guardians because they double-crossed her about the batteries. (Ya remember the batteries?) Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2 has its flaws – it doesn’t help that the ultimate head of the Ravagers is called “Stakar Ogard” and is played by, of all people, Sylvester Stallone (who has not aged well) – but, as I said earlier, I enjoyed it a lot more than I did its predecessor. I especially liked the use of music in the film, particularly the hit song “Brandy” by Looking Glass (who practically defined the term “one-hit wonder” with this song), whom Ego proclaims the greatest piece of music Earth culture has ever produced. (I’d beg to differ: even leaving out the entire world of classical and jazz and staying within the rock-pop genre, if I had to pick one song as the greatest of all time it would be The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.”) More importantly, he sees himself as the male protagonist of the song, leaving Brandy behind because his one true love was the sea – or, in his case, the universe.

I also liked the use of Sam Cooke’s hit “Bring It On Home to Me” as the record Peter uses to seduce Gamora, though when Peter says that Sam Cooke was one of the greatest male singers Earth had ever produced I was irked that he didn’t mention the second voice on that record: Lou Rawls, also one of the greatest male singers Earth ever produced. The only record I got my goat was Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son,” which was used at the end; not only are there better songs about fathers and sons becoming estranged (like Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle”) but I never liked Cat Stevens (his voice always sounded like Cat Torture to me) and I liked him even less when he converted to Islam, changed his name to “Yusuf Islam” (the imdb.com list of soundtrack credits gives “Yusuf Islam” as the composer and “Cat Stevens” as the performer) and, among other things, publicly endorsed the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s call for the murder of The Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie. It’s true that my admiration for Richard Wagner has enabled me to overcome my knowledge of what a racist creep he was, and ditto for Charlie Parker (whose music I love even though off-stage he was a slimeball), but Cat Stevens is no Richard Wagner or Charlie Parker!